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Darwinism proved! Hawaiian crickets converge on no chirp

The killer flies have an unusual ability to pinpoint a cricket’s location using sound.

After finding its victim – a male cricket, singing to attract a mate – a pregnant fly will spray baby maggots onto the cricket’s back, which burrow in, feed, and emerge a week later leaving the husk of the hapless cricket behind.

The presence of these North American flies placed the crickets, themselves relatively recent arrivals from Australia, under pressure to adapt.

In less than 20 generations, a mutation that leaves males unable to sing spread to over 90% of the crickets on the island of Kauai. More.

Lizard Plasticity – March 2013
Excerpt: So in this study, plasticity experiments were conducted. When the lizards were taken off a plant diet and returned to their native insect diet, the cecal valves in their stomachs began to revert within weeks. As the authors conclude, this pointed heavily to plasticity as a cause. We can infer that the this gut morphology likewise arose in similar fashion when coming into contact with the plant diet.http://biota-curve.blogspot.co.....icity.html

Ms Zuk discusses her cricket study at about 10mins. Turns out the flys have cricket ears. That may be convergent evo? Quiet crickets surviving on 2 islands is hardly convergent I would think….http://breakingbio.com/2014/01.....rlene-zuk/

as a side note, I’ve always thought the world be far more like a horror film if we were the size of insects. I mean just imagine having to deal with a preying mantis or scorpion if they were the same size as we are.

Wd400, in the video I posted Dr Zuk suggests the mutation was “burbling along at a very low level” and you would not be looking for it. She continues “the mutation could have knocked back, knocked back” but there all along.

Maybe it was a vestigal organ:) And I will venture to guess additional flatwings will show up in other populations now that they are famous.

It’s not possible to rule out that flatwinged crickets were always there are very rare (or mutating into existence and dropping back out) but it’s clear from this research that two separate mutations are responsible for the trait in the different islands.

It remains true that the island have different mutations which arose separately and recently.